Out of Print, if Not Off Clock

By Tony Gervino

May 3, 2014

I have been bracing myself for this news for some time. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Mel Kiper Jr., ESPN’s lead N.F.L. draft expert, is, after all, only human. Kiper has produced his N.F.L. draft report since 1979, and I always knew that at some point, he would type his last word, hit send and that would be that.

Still, the email I received in late March was pleasant but cruelly brief, informing me that Kiper, 53, would immediately cease production of his guide. I read between the lines: For the 2014 N.F.L. draft, and in the future, subscribers would be on their own.

One could hardly blame Kiper, a Baltimore native, for wanting to devote more time to his wife (and business partner), Kim, and their two daughters. Life is too short to be working 18-hour days most of the year. Still, I contacted him, ostensibly to find the back story, but the truth is, I was hoping that I could somehow dissuade him. After we spoke, I better understood his decision: Kiper, the human equivalent of Deep Blue, needed a break. For about three decades hence.

“Imagine three phone lines ringing constantly — boom, boom, boom — from 6 a.m. to midnight, from August, when we send out order forms, until the following June,” Kiper said as he described life in his home office. “That will wear on you after 35 years.”

Besides, he added, laughing: “I said at last year’s draft that there was a 99.9 percent chance that I wasn’t doing another one. I guess people didn’t believe me.” For the uninitiated, Mel Kiper’s annual draft report is a 150-page-or-so, black-and-white, single-spaced draft manifesto written by someone who clearly devotes his life to scouting football players. You can read 250 words on a slot receiver from Michigan State, if Kiper sees his worth. And for people like me, it is a draft bible that is a lot like an actual Bible, but instead of being filled with inspiring tales, it is filled with characters that have “ideal height” and suffer from playing “upright in the hole.”

The “blue book,” as longtime subscribers refer to it, was always more of a boutique product for die-hard fans, selling, at the height of its popularity last year, no more than 8,000 copies. This is up from the 130 copies it sold in 1981 — the first year it was available to the public. (During its first two years, Kiper created the draft report solely for league and team personnel.)

But with its 2013 cover price of $26.95, the publication almost seemed designed to repel casual draft observers. With the amount of time Kiper put into producing it, the draft report may, in fact, be the least successful get-rich-quick scheme in history.

Unlike newsstand draft publications that begin appearing in late February, Kiper’s book never arrived in mailboxes (or in recent years, in .pdf format) before the second week of April — roughly two weeks before past years’ drafts. So subscribers barely have had time to study it before a draft got underway. That was by design; those few extra weeks made the information more current.

“I could have gone on the newsstand, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made a lot of money,” Kiper said. “But those books finalize their information in January, before the Senior Bowl, before the combine, before pro days. It would have been horrible. And so I waited until the last possible moment.”

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CreditChris Morris

The no-frills appearance did not help increase business, either; the draft report persistently eschewed four-color photography, never promised extended coverage on the web or used any of the telltale signs of a magazine produced after Kiper’s fifth birthday. In that way, the 1993 guide does not look much different from the 2013 version. Put it this way: If a Luddite wanted to follow the N.F.L. draft, his or her search for reference material would end at Kiper’s doorstep.

“You find when things get a little popular, they become too glitzy,” Kiper said. “And so it was a conscious decision not to change the way the blue book was printed, never change the printing material, or even the format.”

Kiper is taking most of his content to ESPN, where he is now seen multiple times daily sparring with Todd McShay, the network’s Robin to his Batman. He will provide his top 100, the underrated/overrated lists and a mock draft of Rounds 1 through 3 to ESPN.com. He will be featured on ESPN radio and in ESPN the Magazine and still be subjected to the handful of wince-inducing videos of his making erroneous predictions. And he will smile throughout, because that is what is expected of him. But I fear that the essence of what he had previously provided to us — our security blanket of draft knowledge — will forever be lost.

Full disclosure: I have watched the N.F.L. draft telecasts in their entirety for the last two decades. (Once, at my wife’s grandmother’s birthday party, I sat on the end of a twin bed in a guest room and listened to it on the radio, which engendered ill will that I spent years digging out from.)

But through it all, the Mel Kiper draft report was something that true N.F.L. draft obsessives like my friends and I could always count on to validate our fixations with the event. Kiper’s compulsion to dive so deeply into the skills of players from obscure colleges and universities has been nothing short of awe-inspiring to many of us. His near-fanatical commitment to us mirrored ours to the draft.

My wife would spy me sitting in front of the television, feverishly scribbling notes on my yellow legal pad, saying excitedly, and to no one in particular: “Quiet! The Vikings are nearly on the clock!” and then spot Kiper’s draft report beside me, and know that at least one person had looser moorings than I. Kiper is the acceptable edge of the unacceptable part of our brains that become fixated on things.

Maybe this year, I will distract myself and attend the draft, scheduled for May 8 to 10 at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. More than likely, I will stay home with my legal pad, notes, laptop and highlighter pen, and watch Kiper spar with McShay, while feeling a sense of melancholy wash over me. And so I asked Kiper again if he was truly, really ready to quit the draft report, because, as you may have deduced, I am not quite ready to say goodbye.

“Four years from now, five or 10 years from now, you never know,” Kiper said. “It’s something I could easily do again if I wanted to, so I can’t say definitively 100 percent I never will.”

But I heard it in his voice. He is done — he knows it, I know it and his wife knows it. Sadly, it is truly the end of an era for the draftniks. Unfortunately, some of my brethren are not taking it as well as I am.

“We still to this day get dozens of calls a day from people saying, ‘Can you at least do a book for me?’ ” Kiper said. “You know, ‘Can you send me all your notes?’ ”